Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.

Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!